The Real Leadership Crunch

Sweeney, Catherine, The Christian Science Monitor

Since Confucius and Plato, scholars have theorized about how
humans lead. Leadership is everywhere - in business, government, and
even the home. And yet, as historian and noted leadership scholar
James MacGregor Burns has noted, "Leadership is one of the most
observed and least understood phenomena on earth."

In a presidential election year, our thoughts turn naturally to
leadership. Our world has grown so complex, so interconnected, that
we need leaders who can engineer consent and cooperation to make
necessary changes that will improve our communities, nation, and
world.

"Never in our history have there been more massive demographic
changes, greater differences in socio-economic well-being, and such
alarming environmental and social challenges," says John Parr, past
president of the National Civic League. "And never before has there
been such a lack of confidence in the abilities of our leaders and
institutions to address these challenges."

However, effective leadership is going on all the time in our
communities at the grass-roots level.

So what's missing overall? I believe it is the identification and
explicit training of future leaders. It is time for colleges and
universities to formally prepare students to be leaders. And it's
time for the media to acknowledge that it can be done. Schools
prepare accountants, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, historians,
poets, journalists, scientists, mathematicians, and novelists.

But, by and large, they leave the study and practice of
leadership to chance.

Of course, higher education has always presumed to educate
tomorrow's leaders. But in the first half of the 20th century, only
a small percentage of Americans attended college and they were often
- by virtue of birthright - already destined for leadership roles in
society. Thus it was an easy claim to make.

It is not so easy today. A far larger cohort of citizens attend
college than was the case a half-century ago. How many of them will
become effective leaders? Not enough, I fear, although the potential
is there.

Until 80 years ago, only isolated scholars gave much attention to
the characteristics of effective leaders and the process of
leadership. More recently, leadership has become a subject for
serious scholarship.

Since World War II, thousands of studies and books have been
published about leadership processes. From this body of knowledge,
and from some older sources, has grown the awareness that leadership
can be taught.

In other words, the question of whether leaders are born or made
has been answered. …

The rest of this article is only available to active members of Questia

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.